2:34AM
by Bone Dry
Summary: Another self-indulgent random drabble, this time set pre-Veritas.


2:34 AM, Saturday— Sunday now. Steam billows from vents in the sidewalk, the endless, collective exhale of the millions of machines living just under the city's stone-and-concrete skin. Just at the lip of an alley, a few feet from the exit of a bar that's still open, a small crowd of people are huddled together against the wind, smoking and chatting in that too loud way that seems to be the exclusive property of drunk 20-somethings. Out in the open it's freezing, and the whole world smells like garbage and food and gasoline and wet pavement. The rain had stopped maybe an hour ago.

Kate Beckett takes one last look at the street, then follows Richard Castle down the steps to the Old Haunt. She meets him at the door just as he opens it. "Would you get the lights?" he asks, even as she's already stepping inside and reaching for the switches.

"Yeah," she says, flipping them. The old timey lights flicker on after half a second, reflect off the beaten up hardwood floor and the piano. Beckett inhales, smells alcohol and a hundred plus years of old tobacco. The floors and the bar are still wet from being wiped down after closing.

"What'll you have?" Castle asks as he sweeps behind the bar. He grabs a towel and throws it over his shoulder.

"Scotch," she says, taking a seat. "Neat."

"You read my mind," he says. He bends out of sight, and Beckett finds herself glaring at a row of back-lit bottles for a few seconds.

Castle's voice drifts up, "Have I mentioned how awesome it is that there're false floorboards back here?"

"Only every time we're here," she replies, though not unkindly.

He grins at her when he comes back up with a bottle. "Been saving this one. Eighteen year old single malt."

Beckett almost wishes he would've just pulled one off the shelf. She doesn't drink scotch as a connoisseur. It's not to say that she doesn't appreciate it, but when it comes down to it, she doesn't drink hard liquor to savor it. Savoring is a rich man's hobby. She just wants to slam the damn thing down. One doesn't need a five hundred dollar plus bottle of scotch for that.

She says none of this though. Just smiles at him as he takes a couple glasses and sets them down, pours them both a finger. Perhaps sensing her mood, he doesn't go into further details on the vintage or the flavors or whatever country he had probably imported it from. They raise their glasses.

"Clink," she says, tapping his glass, then downs it.

The stuff just tastes like money. She exhales as it burns a path to her stomach. The taste lingers, rich and smokey. The small edge in her chest melts under the warmth of the alcohol. She immediately craves a second.

"Tell me your thoughts," Castle says. He's still smiling at her, but not quite so boyishly. His glass is also empty.

She just looks at him. It's like a scene from some old movie, where the woman seeks to unburden her soul to some perfect, proverbial stranger in the anonymity of a bar. Except the bar's closed, and she's marrying the bartender.

"Another," she says.

After a beat, he obliges. They clink glasses again, and she tosses it back. It still seems wrong to drink it like this, but already she's finding it a little hard to care.

"So what now?" he asks.

Beckett looks up from the glass to meet Castle's eyes, but she doesn't really see him. Her head's still stuck in that Greenpoint alley, and at the drop-off zone at LaGuardia. Vulcan Simmons had left his cushy Brooklyn loft to meet Jason Marks about... something, then dropped him off at the airport. After a month of trailing him, to watch yet another opening slip away, it's grating her. She'd wanted so badly to get out of the car and follow the little shrimp into the airport, corner him in a bathroom after badging her way through TSA, shove her pistol in his face and demand some answers. Every day without leverage is another day where her fate hangs on a bluff and a bag of confetti in her desk. Every day without leverage is another day where she has to see Simmons walking free on the streets, where she has to see Bracken on the news.

It pisses her off.

"I don't know," she says. "We just keep doing what we're doing, I guess."

"For how long?"

She shrugs, "Until something changes."

He looks at her for a long moment, seeming to search her face for something. She can sense a question rising in his throat. Instead of asking it, he walks around the bar and takes the seat next to her. She slides around in her seat to face the away from the bar, and for a moment they both look at the wooden booths with their green, vinyl cushions and the long row of pictures on the wall. She knows he put a picture of the two of them up there at some point after the two of them had finally realized their relationship had been out to the entire precinct for god knows how long.

"Mind if I ask you something?" he says.

She snorts. "Since when do you ask permission to pry?"

He looks at her, smiles slightly. "Point taken."

She gives him that same smile back, though she has a feeling that whatever it is, she's not going to want to answer. "So what is it?"

He pauses, seeming to think. "Why didn't you ever let it go?"

She feels the smile fade. "Let what go?"

"Your mom."

The word hurts, but just slightly, in that same scarred-over spot somewhere in her lower gut. She looks away.

"Sorry," he says. "You don't have to answer that."

"No, it's fine," she says. And it is fine. She's been asked the same question a couple thousand times by now: by her dad, by the two shrinks she's had over the years, by herself. She can still remember that question haunting her at the ICU, as she'd lain there weak and doped to the gills. Why had she held onto this? When had it moved from grief to obsession? Why doesn't it bother her more that this will almost certainly destroy her?

And still those old ghosts follow her, clamoring for some rhyme or reason.

"I took it hard," she hears herself saying. "My dad and I both took it hard, but we reacted to it differently. He drank." And drank and drank. "And I shut down."

She can feel Castle looking at her, but she can't tear her gaze off a small tear in one of those green, vinyl cushions. There's a little bit of white stuffing poking out. "The first few years were really hard. I had to transfer from Stanford to NYU, had to try to keep things together. For awhile, that was all my life was. My mom left this big, giant hole in our lives, and I didn't want to fill it. I couldn't fill it."

As she says it she can feel something loosen in her heart. Even after all these years, the grief still harbors there, and she can feel her soul long to swim in it again. Sometimes it still bothers her how little it hurts.

"I lost my friends, I changed my major, I stopped doing the stuff that made me happy." She swallows. "It just felt wrong, you know? My dad was falling apart, my mom was dead, how the hell could I even justify going out? I didn't want to talk to anyone. I didn't want to feel better.

"It was comforting to be back in the city. In California, you know, people ask you how you're doing and you're constantly running in to people. Here, no one gives a shit, and I was glad. I was glad to be one in eight million."

Castle touches her. She looks down to see his hand on hers, then takes it. His hand is warm and large, his skin soft. He slowly rubs his thumb over her hand.

"I'm sorry," he says.

"You already knew all this," she says, glancing at him.

"I'm still sorry."

That does hurt. Finally, she feels the grief start to rise, feels the air get heavier. It's almost a relief. It never stops bothering her that the loss no longer actively hurts her, and that it hasn't for a long, long time.

"I don't know why I never let it go," she says. "I spent so long just drowning in it, and it was so easy. I didn't make friends. I just studied. And then at some point my nights became centered on my dad, on trying to get him clean. And every time I walked into that apartment, she was just everywhere. Half of her stuff he didn't touch until the move. Both of us were afraid to touch it. We were afraid to box her away. We didn't want to admit that she was gone. We didn't want to admit that we'd never see her again."

She slips off the bench, almost not even fully conscious of it, and she goes to lean against a support beam. She looks at Castle, but she can't seem to maintain eye contact, so she picks a point in space to stare at.

"I'd lost other people before her. I was old enough when my grandparents died to know what was going on. But we'd known for years that their time was coming. It wasn't a shock when they died. I'd known when I'd left my grandmother that day at the hospital that I'd never see her again. I mean, it still hurt, but it was different. I had my parents, and they had me. But with mom..." she trails off, not even quite knowing what she's trying to say. "With mom, she just fell out of our lives. No warning— she was just gone, suddenly and inexplicably. One minute we're waiting to have dinner because I was gonna be going back to California for the spring semester in a few days, and the next we're finding a cop at our door. Even after seeing her in the morgue, even after seeing the alley, even after the funeral, it didn't feel like something that was really happening. People die in movies and in books. People die when they're 90 years old in a hospital with family around their bed. In the real world, people you love don't just fall off the face of the Earth. Except, of course, when they do." She glances at him, is somewhat surprised to see the sadness on his face, but she can't seem to keep eye contact. It burns too much.

"I think I could've moved on if I'd tried, but it was just so easy not to. I mean, at first it was impossible. Dealing with my dad ate up increasingly more of my time, and it was years before he finally came to terms. By then I had already become a cop. And at that point I had seen domestic abuse and drugs and just so many broken people. After Royce and I responded to an incident report and I walked into my first homicide, that was it. I had to know who had done this to us. Not even a few days later I was down in archives looking for her file. And that was the start of it."

She looks at Castle again, but this time she doesn't look away. "I don't know why I couldn't let it go," she says again. "I don't know why I let my world become defined by my loss, but I did. It seemed totally and completely bizarre to me that the world just kept on turning without her, that suddenly another year had passed since she'd died, and then another. Those shitty soap operas she used to love kept producing episodes she'd never see, her favorite restaurants kept on serving customers, her law firm expanded. It made me sick. Why didn't it seem to matter? We had such a small family, and it was just us carrying on her memory." The pain suddenly comes on hard, rising in her throat like something hot and solid. She reaches for the chain around her neck and pulls it out from under the turtleneck. "I started wearing this. I wanted her to know that she still matters to someone."

She can feel her eyes sting as she stares down at the ring, but no tears come. It bothers her. Even after all this time and all the therapy, it bothers her that it doesn't hurt the way it used to. It feels like a betrayal. If she lets it go... she can't let her go.

"I don't know when this became a crusade," she says. "At some point it stopped being about her. I think it started when I killed Dick Coonan. He murdered my mom." That admission cuts her heart. "And I killed him. He died with his blood all over my hands."

"Yeah, I remember," Castle says, his voice slightly husky.

She clears her throat. "It's too late now," she says. "After they shot me, after Maddox and that file blew up... it's too late for letting go. You know as well as I do that getting something on Bracken is the only way out of this. Making peace won't remove the crosshairs from my back."

He stands up and walks to her. For a long moment, they just stand there. This whole thing just seems ridiculous— confession at a bar at 2 in the morning. Grief rolls through her in slow, heavy waves. Those old scars pull. She can still almost feel the bullet searing through her flesh.

"We'll find something," he says. "That crosshair on your back— it won't be there forever. I promise you."

She smiles at him. It hurts. Grief claws at her eyes, fights for release, but still no tears. She bats at her eyes, sniffing. Keeps on smiling.

And then she moves off the support beam, moves forward and reaches for him, pulls him down to meet her. She finds his lips with a weird, sudden crash of desperation. She feels the grief pour out of her mouth into some point between them, feels them crushing against each other. Sometimes it's a wonder to her that she's still alive. Sometimes she thinks some part of her died along with her mother in that alley.

Grief rises with something else, something much warmer and less specific. She tastes that stupid, expensive scotch on his tongue. She feels the pressure of his hands move through her hair, up her back. She wants to hurt but she doesn't. She wants to believe him but she's not sure that she does.

Because people do just fall off the world. And she doesn't know how much longer she can keep Bracken from hiring another Coonan, another Lockwood, another Maddox. Her would-be executioners.

They come up to breathe.

"I don't want to let her go," she whispers. "I can't let her go."

"That's okay," he says. They're less than inches apart. She can fill his breath puff against her face. "You don't have to, Kate. You're allowed to grieve."

She chokes. Pain and love swirl in her chest, squeeze her heart.

"I'm sorry for the question," he strokes the side of her face slowly. "You don't owe me an explanation."

She doesn't know what to say to that. Sometimes late at night, when she's alone and she can't sleep, she'll tell herself something like that, just for the assurance. She forgives herself. But it's been harder these last few years, since the shooting. Grieving seems like something selfish.

"Thanks," she says. It seems completely inadequate, but standing there, it's all she has. They kiss again, but with a third the intensity. It's the proximity. "I'm really tired," she says into his mouth.

Their foreheads touch. She can smell his damp clothes, and the alcohol.

"Want to go home?" he asks.

"Yeah," she says.

For a moment longer, they don't disentangle. There doesn't really seem to be a reason to.

But then they do.


End file.
